Low cost STM8S103F3P6 Board – Review and Getting Started Guide

— July 23, 2015

STM8 series has already captured a large share of 8 Bit controller market in Industry. It is also gaining popularity in DIY community all over world, all credit goes to great features of this family, plenty of documentation and low cost Discovery Kits by ST Microelectronics. There are also many ultra low cost minimum system boards available on Ebay, Ali Express, Amazon etc. I picked some of these boards recently from this Indian vendor. These boards costs less than Rs. 150 and puts all I/O on PCB headers, power supply, reset switch, SWIM connector and a test LED connected to Port B.5.

STM8S103F3P6 Minimum system Board

Board Features

SWIM Connector

Voltage Regulator [3V3 - AMS1117]

Micro USB connector to power the board over USB, SmartPhone Charger

All Pin Outs

Power LED

USER LED, Connected to PB.5

RESET Switch

Schematic

Schematic for STM8S103F3P6 Dev Board

Programming

Programming this low cost board is exactly similar to programming STM8S Discovery board. I have already covered Tutorial on Getting Started with STM8S Discovery. Only trick is, this low cost board doesn’t have ST-Link so we need an external ST-Link for STM8 to program this board. One can use a STM8S/ STM8SVL Discovery board as ST-Link V2 to program this board. Standard ST-Link V2 can also be used to program this board.

Some modification are needed on Discovery boards to use them as STM8 ST-Link. Open Solder Bridges SB1 and SB2 near SWIM connector to use STM8S Discovery as STM8 ST-Link.

STM8S as ST-Link

STM8 Discovery as ST-Link Programmer

Using STM8S/ STM8L Discovery as ST-Link can program only STM8 Series of MCUs while standard ST-Link V2 can program and debug both STM8 and STM32 MCUs.

Hi Max,
The 0x in 0×20 indicates the value is in hexadecimal format. In binary it would be 0b00100000. You can see now that the 1 is in the 6th position which corresponds to port 5 when you consider the first port (position) is port 0.

So instead of 0×20 you could write 0b00100000 (binary) or 32 (decimal). All the same. You just need to know what system you are working in.